PPC Conversion Tracking for Affiliates

Pay per click advertising is a strategy for generating traffic which all affiliates aspire to master. Unfortunately for about ninety-five percent of them, mastery is something that will forever remain out of reach. Of the remaining five percent who do manage to profit from their campaigns, an understanding of conversion tracking is almost always the reason for their success.

So what exactly is conversion tracking?

It is the process of following the clicks, literally, to determine which campaigns are generating more revenue in affiliate commissions than the fees being paid out for the traffic being sent to that campaign. Ideally you want to be making at least twice in commissions what you are paying for the traffic, since this will net you a one hundred percent return on investment.

In order to assist affiliates in this enterprise, the affiliate networks allow affiliates to send along a tracking sub ID in their affiliate URLs. For example, if you are a ClickBank affiliate you will be familiar with the idea that you can add a TID variable to your affiliate URL. Many affiliates use this form of tracking to see which non-PPC traffic sources are generating sales. For example, links on their Squidoo pages might carry a tid=squidoo assignment in the affiliate link.

But zero-cost affiliate marketing techniques usually get affiliates only so far. Getting to the next level generally requires some form of paid traffic strategy. At this point it becomes extremely important to know which campaigns are generating sales, and which are simply wasting your money.

Usually it occurs to affiliates who have some appreciation of conversion tracking that they can track campaigns by attaching unique affiliate URLs to every keyword used to power an ad group. Often integer values are used for the tracking sub IDs and these are later matched up with keywords when the commission reports are made available by the affiliate networks. The only problem is that this can represent a LOT of work. Especially if you run campaigns that carry thousands of keywords.

So what is the answer?

Clearly some form of automation is called for. At this point affiliates look around for software that might be able to do the job for them. Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of choices available. At least, not inexpensive ones. But there is one solution that implements a form of tracking that I can recommend. I think it will interest all affiliates hoping to take their pay per click efforts to the next level.

Every year super affiliate Jeremy Palmer spends hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for traffic from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MicroSoft AdCenter. But not until he developed his own PPC conversion tracking solution did he see his profits really start to soar. He has now released his software under the name Optimize My Site.

Recently I got my hands on this software, and now I have written up a full review of it. To find out how Optimize My Site works, and determine whether or not it might be the conversion tracking solution that you are looking for, get across to my Optimize My Site Review page and find out why I used the term “flash of genius” in describing Jeremy’s software implementation. I guarantee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at my conclusions.